People
Real lives
Children of the Empire
As the modern Commonwealth marks its 60th year, parts of the old British Empire still hold childhood memories for many of us. Peter Sampson, pictured right, recalls heady days of Pharaohs and flying-boats
I grow old, I grow old and when I go on that final, great excursion from which no traveller returns, a tiny fragment of England’s history will go with me and with my companions. We’re in our seventies now and there must be a few of us still around. It was all a long, long time ago but even now I sometimes dream of mangoes and green lizards and the long wailing cry of muezzins over the rooftops of Cairo.
You could call us “the children of Empire”, I suppose, though it sounds a bit pompous.
We were the children of the Thirties and Forties whose parents helped to keep the wheels turning in what was then a still confident British Empire. Our fathers and mothers worked in the embassies and banks, the armed forces and the tea or rubber plantations, they worked for Shell or BOAC or Unilever and brought up their children in India and Hong Kong and Rhodesia, in Malaya and Kenya and Egypt.
We were sent “home” to England for our schooling, often to some minor boarding school in the Home Counties or the West of England. Only in the summer holidays did we go back to our parents, those friendly strangers, for six weeks of unfamiliar cries in crowded, jostling streets, of fierce sun and swimming pools and pungent smells, before returning to the drizzle and chill of an English winter.
It was a difficult transition. One day, breathless and sweating, we were climbing the Great Pyramid at Giza or gazing wide-eyed at the golden coffins of Tutankhamun. The following week, we were scrabbling in the mud of a chilly rugby field in an autumnal Somerset.
So it’s no wonder our dreams are still sometimes haunted by that wailing cry of the muezzins. It was part of our childhood. So was the chirrup of cicadas through the warm evenings and nights. Grass was coarser than English grass. Coffee, drunk from tiny cups in pavement cafs, was stronger and sweeter. There were snakes in the sandy garden and hoopoes on the grass.
We children of the Empire had seen dolphins and flying-fish. We had flown halfway around the world in Sunderland flying-boats that took off from Poole harbour and landed on the Nile at midnight in the centre of a brightly lit and noisy Cairo. Old wartime Dakotas had flown us there by way of Marseilles and Rome and Malta and El Adem, landing at Cairo’s Almazah Airport after a two-day journey, to be greeted by parents who always commented on how much we had grown.
Outside the flat in the leafy suburbs of Zamalek or Heliopolis, lepers begged on the pavement. The alleys of the Mouski, Cairo’s native bazaar, were crowded with cross-legged men hammering out patterns on brass trays. From tiny, open-fronted shops, other men sold silks and carpets and gold trinkets and lapis lazuli. There were pistachio and garlic and cinnamon smells and the cries of men selling sweet drinks from large glass urns they balanced on their hips.
We ate rich chocolate cake at Groppi’s, sitting at a table under a canopy of netting and bougainvillea as the city’s Syrian, French, Lebanese and Greek merchants gossiped and bargained. A few hot weeks later, as every year, it was back to Heathrow and the muddy Somerset fields.
Then the war came and all our lives were overturned and the Empire began to crumble.
We saw young men in Cairo wearing the blue suits, white shirts and red ties of sick or wounded servicemen back from the desert. One afternoon, my father came home to say that he had just been to a meeting at the British Embassy where the married men had been told to get their families out of the country that same evening. It was 1942 and Rommel was poised to capture Alexandria and then Cairo. The Embassy chimneys smoked furiously as the diplomats began burning files and documents.
So, at midnight, my mother and I sat with other families on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel, waiting for the coach that would take us across the desert to Suez and a two-month sea journey on the RMS Andes, round Cape Town and up to Greenock in a convoy pursued by U-boats. We children thought it was all jolly exciting, though it must have been a constant terror for our mothers.
Few people had yet heard of a place called El Alamein.
When the war was over, the school holidays to every corner of the Empire resumed as though nothing had changed and the world was still the same bright, confident morning. BOAC’s coach terminal in the Cromwell Road buzzed each summer with children in school caps and blazers, flying out from England’s post-war drabness and rationing to six or eight weeks of swimming and cricket and ice-cream in a world we were too young to recognise as dying, a world of servants and sporting clubs and colonial confidence.
My final visit was on a university summer vacation shortly before the extraordinary adventure of the Suez invasion in 1956, when the British lion tried to convince itself and the world that it could still give an imperial roar. One unforeseen consequence of the adventure was that my father, after 30 years in a country he loved, was kicked ignominiously out with £10 and two suitcases.
The last days of Empire were over and we children had lived through them, too young to know it was happening.
Nowadays, of course, to my grandchildren, it’s all as remote as Tutankhamun.
This story first appeared in the January 2009 edition of Saga Magazine. Subscribe to read Robert Chesshyre's account of his childhood abroad.
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